Should Businesses Have Mobile Friendly Websites?

cellPhoneSafe: "A client of ours has asked us to develop a mobile friendly version of their website. Their CEO has a Pocket PC and his browsing experience of his site is not great. However, aside from keeping him happy, is there a business case for a mobile friendly version of his site? Is there actually any volume of web surfers using a Pocket PC, Palm, or other web-capable pocket devices? It's one thing to convince a client of the benefit of supporting Mozilla (else they'll loose 10% of potential customers), but how do the figures stack up for mobile users? To be honest, I'd be surprised if mobile users accounted for more than 1 in a 1000 visitors to a site, so I'd be interested in your experiences. Have you developed a website for mobile users? Were you overwhelmed with new customers? Did these mobile users expect a different service offering to traditional PC users?"

Comments

mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved

[yagu]

I can only speak from my personal experiences with mobile internet, and they've been mostly disappointing, but I think the shortcoming is more in the form factor and less in the reluctance or resistance of the internet developers to provide mobile compatible web sites.

I first surfed "mobile" with a cell phone, "duette" (can't remember the manufacturer, doesn't matter). It had a small something-like six or seven line black and white character based screen. The access to the internet was provided by the phone service, and apparently they pretty much mapped the web sited you would access, there was no notion of "address bar" (that I remember). The speed was slow, the sites were rarely updated, and the presentation was terrible.

Fast forward to a month ago when I got the latest Palm with hi-res screen and wi-fi built in. I mostly got it for the high quality screen (which has not disappointed) but looked forward to also having near hi-res internet experience. This device has essentially half-VGA resolution and hence gives "normal" surfing access to the internet.

I've not encountered too many sites that bother to accommodate mobile devices, and after using the Palm TX for a while I see why. The Palm is probably one of the better devices for screen quality and even then (even when a site "does mobile"), the experience is unsatisfactory. (Google actually does a mobile presentation, but I actually would prefer it didn't -- the real estate and presentation is SO clamped down, I'd prefer panning the screen.)

In my opinion, I don't think there is much to be done about creating a satisfactory, let alone a "great" experience for mobile devices. Their form factor is just too small -- there are far too many people who, even with high resolution, cannot use these to surf the net comfortably.

If I were making decisions about a web site and whether to accommodate mobile devices my first instinct would be to ignore that niche. I wonder if there are any compelling counters to this experience?

Depends on the nature of your business

[aztektum]

I work @ Sprint and a lot of our customers that look at our PDA devices have been asking the sales people "Will it work with my bank site?" There is a demand, I think, for certain businesses to offer mobile access to accounts to pay bills and all that. However does say Intel really have a reason for a "mobile" site? Would General Motors need one? But if you're a service provider (cable, utility), financial institution, or a Google or Yahoo, then catering to a mobile audience at least partially, could be a bonus.

*sigh*

[TrumpetPower!]

Anytime anybody asks these kinds of questions, it's just a vivid demonstration of how clueless said person is when it comes to just what this Intarweb thing is.

Rather than beat you over the head with your misunderstandings, let me just skip to the chase.

Design your sites in this order, and you'll never be concerned with these kinds of questions again.

1. Design your site in valid XHTML / HTML 4.0 / whatever that looks good in lynx.
2. Knock yourself out with CSS to make it look fantastic in your personal favorite choice of Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc.
3. Add just enough <!--[if IE]>blah<[endif]--> statements to make it look good in all versions of IE that're still supported by Microsoft.
4. If somebody points out handheld devices, screen readers, etc., that understand CSS but do a poor job of rendering the CSS you used on your site, create a custom stylesheet just for them.

That's it. That's all there is to it. When you're done, you've got a Web site that looks great on all platforms and validates to all meaningful standards. And, if it weren't for Microsoft, you could reasonably forget the last two steps.

Cheers,

b&

It's a lot like accessibility.

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

How about making the site accessible for screen readers to assist the disabled. If you look into it, you will find that It has a lot in common with mobile users... Nobody can remember 15 menu items when they hear them, and then navigate back to them. Nobody can understand pages when they are described if they are too complicated.

You need to radically simplify presentation to make them comfortably usable by the bandwidth impaired, be it visual bandwidth in terms of vision, or using magnifiers, or using a PDA, or in terms of having the keep the structure in you head while listening to the page being
described.

If the company is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and employees are expected to access the site, then they are pretty much compelled to make it accessible. You can
get PDA support for free riding on that.

Yes

[sulli]

Yes, they should
make their web
pages small enough
for cellphone
users to read.